Shortlisted for the Forward prize for both his previous collections and named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 20 "next generation poets" in 2004, Matthew Francis already has an impressive pedigree. With this outstanding volume, his place among contemporary British poetry's aristocracy is confirmed.

Each poem in this brief, beautiful book conforms to the same strict template: a 45-syllable sestet in which the lines, declining in length from 13 syllables to four, enact the sense of distillation, of homing in, that is a crucial feature of these poems. Francis revels in the brevity of his chosen form; his decision to restrict each poem to the exploration of a single item - a thought, a moment, an individual image - produces a collection that resembles a series of luminous miniatures, painted on the page in precise and glowing brush-strokes.

Light is central to these intensely visual poems, its various qualities meticulously captured and lingered over. In "Indoor Market, Cardiff", for example, where the poet watches his companion "pass through the wet light of the fishmonger's, / into the gleam of sweet jars", the "wet light" vividly recalls the glisten of ice and fish scales, while the "gleam of sweet jars" evokes both the sweets' jewel-like radiance and the glint of light off glass. Confined to a handful of syllables in each poem, he weighs his words with scrupulous care and makes each one work overtime, as in his description of a coastline where "the land [is] fretted to islands", in which the primary picture of the land worried into pieces by the restless ocean is deepened and enriched by the images of rolling sea frets and intricate fretwork that the word simultaneously conjures.

The sea is another preoccupation. A sequence of five poems considers its different aspects, beginning with a bird's eye view of the "long crinkle of shoreline // and the blank space beyond" in "Sky Road", moving through an exploration of its borders in "Harbour" and "Strand" and finishing with the evidence of its passing in "Rockpool" and "Driftwood". With characteristic elegance, he chooses to examine it obliquely, finding out its shape from the impressions it makes on other things, like someone describing a scene from the shadows it casts. This is in fact something he goes on to do in "Party", which begins: "There are more shadows dancing on the wall than dancers", an image that deftly captures the sense of loneliness at the heart of a celebration that the poem goes on to explore, as well as exhibiting once more the subtlety with which Francis approaches his subjects.

Perhaps the best indicator of a collection's worth is the number of times you are moved to read from it to the person next to you. Virtually every poem in this collection had me casting around for someone with whom to share it. "Whereabouts is it, that / Euclidean land // fashioned from light?" Francis asks at the end of the collection's final poem. The land - his whereabouts - is here in the poems of his collection: geometrically perfect, illuminated.